Connected: An Internet Encyclopedia
RFC 1510 - 2.4. Postdated tickets

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### 2.4. Postdated tickets

Applications may occasionally need to obtain tickets for use much later, e.g., a batch submission system would need tickets to be valid at the time the batch job is serviced. However, it is dangerous to hold valid tickets in a batch queue, since they will be on-line longer and more prone to theft. Postdated tickets provide a way to obtain these tickets from the KDC at job submission time, but to leave them "dormant" until they are activated and validated by a further request of the KDC. If a ticket theft were reported in the interim, the KDC would refuse to validate the ticket, and the thief would be foiled.

The MAY-POSTDATE flag in a ticket is normally only interpreted by the ticket-granting service. It can be ignored by application servers. This flag must be set in a ticket-granting ticket in order to issue a postdated ticket based on the presented ticket. It is reset by default; it may be requested by a client by setting the ALLOW- POSTDATE option in the KRB_AS_REQ message. This flag does not allow a client to obtain a postdated ticket-granting ticket; postdated ticket-granting tickets can only by obtained by requesting the postdating in the KRB_AS_REQ message. The life (endtime-starttime) of a postdated ticket will be the remaining life of the ticket- granting ticket at the time of the request, unless the RENEWABLE option is also set, in which case it can be the full life (endtime- starttime) of the ticket-granting ticket. The KDC may limit how far in the future a ticket may be postdated.

The POSTDATED flag indicates that a ticket has been postdated. The application server can check the authtime field in the ticket to see when the original authentication occurred. Some services may choose to reject postdated tickets, or they may only accept them within a certain period after the original authentication. When the KDC issues a POSTDATED ticket, it will also be marked as INVALID, so that the application client must present the ticket to the KDC to be validated before use.

Next: 2.5. Proxiable and proxy tickets

Connected: An Internet Encyclopedia
RFC 1510 - 2.4. Postdated tickets